Israel gave birth control to Ethiopian Jews without their consent

Words fail to convey the disgust and disdain I feel for these actions. One would think that of all the people in the world, the Israelis would find this kind of action abhorrent. Treating anyone with any drug without their consent and full knowledge of what the drug is is bad enough but the inherent racism in the action is mind-boggling.

One can only assume the Israeli government would have continued the practice if not for the investigative journalist blowing the whistle on the practice.

Israel has admitted for the first time that it has been giving Ethiopian Jewish immigrants birth-control injections, often without their knowledge or consent.

The government had previously denied the practice but the Israeli Health Ministry’s director-general has now ordered gynaecologists to stop administering the drugs. According a report in Haaretz, suspicions were first raised by an investigative journalist, Gal Gabbay, who interviewed more than 30 women from Ethiopia in an attempt to discover why birth rates in the community had fallen dramatically.

One of the Ethiopian women who was interviewed is quoted as saying: “They [medical staff] told us they are inoculations. We took it every three months. We said we didn’t want to.” It is alleged that some of the women were forced or coerced to take the drug while in transit camps in Ethiopia.